To think Gill Rapley should be knighted?

[Happydutchmummy]

Ok, so I'm not sure if women can be knighted, maybe she should be Lady-ed, Dame-d or whatever the correct term is...

My second dc has just started weaning and I'm experiencing the joys of blw again. It's just so awesome. I know she didn't 'invent' it, but she did the research, wrote an amazingly clear book and has changed the way that a lot of parents wean their child. Due to her the nhs has changed its guidelines on weaning to be more finger foods rather than purée and many health care professionals now recommend it.

On top of that she hasn't cashed in with a whole range of blw merchandise, there is no official blw high chair, you can't buy Gill Raply branded bread sticks, etc. it's just her book and recipe book but that's it.

Surely she deserves some official recognition for services to babies, and mums who are too lazy to purée

Erghh, the BLW mania on Mn always scares me, all the 'no, you're not doing it properly, it's a whole way of thinking, living, philosophising!!!!!'. Meh. DS1 had purees for a few weeks, then fork mash/cut up bits of whatever we were eating. DS2 is 'BLW' purely because he completely refuses a spoon. So he gets what we eat just not mashed. Either way it's the same food. Just really messy if purees, and really fucking messy if BLW. Weaning is such a short period of a baby's life, i really do not see how the few weeks when you are introducing new foods can have such an impact on, well, anything really.

I am much more inclined to the idea that fussiness, which usually develops in toddlers, is an evolutionary response designed to protect newly independent children from potentially poisonous foods.
www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-us/cancer-news/press-release/fussy-eating-may-be-evolutionary-adaptation

Am sure that many many parents did BLW for years and centuries before Gill Rapley wrote about it. She wouldn't argue with that. BLW really is a reaction against the idea that weaning involved purees and baby rice (bleurgh) and 'stages' of weaning. Clearly, weaning a baby doesn't need any if those things. And everyone is free to wean their baby however they go damn like. Just don't call it BLW when it's not. Is a matter if definition. And don't say that BLW is 'just cutting up food' because its not.

captainbarnacle as far as I am aware, there is not a copyright on the phrase BLW? So people can call how they feed their baby BLW if they want - you do not own three phrase, however much you wish to.

When your children grow up, whether you ever used a spoon when they were a baby will all seem spectacularly irrelevant in any case - if you can even remember.

Maybe theres baby led weaning (which is what most of us did/do) and then there's Baby Led Weaning which is different and must follow the book.

I have her book (signed by her, in fact), but I must confess I never read it. I did BLW with my DS and I am a big believer in it. I also think she did a good thing with making it more well known, however it think it's more than a little OTT to think she should receive honours for it and therefore YABU . Lots of people have done as much or more for women/babies in their work and their names aren't well known.

Again, people showing their ignorance of Rapley's paper and what BLW has meant since 2005. Exactly that - no one owns or copyrights weaning: so throw your Annabelle Karmel merchandise in the bin. All what BLW is is the book written by Rapley (and a subsequent cookbook which was due to demand and not at all necessary IMO). No one called it Baby Led Weaning before that, even though they may have weaned in a similar way to what the book describes. And I'm not saying that spoons are evil etc. But mixed weaning and handing baby a few finger foods is not BLW - BLW as explained in the Rapley book hadn't been documented like that before.

Thurlow - exactly!

Some babies are lazy/will actively prefer the easier option. Surely as long as you follow their lead, you are doing blw. It's hardly baby-led if you leave them staring mournfully at a tray full of food, while they are opening their mouths and clamouring for a bite of every spoonful the rest of the family takes. That's just being mean!

But, as per Floralnomad I don't have the book so I probably know nothing

And handing someone an honour for merely explaining the un fussy weaning method that babies can eat family foods from the start goes against everything BLW is about. It's not special, parents shouldn't be patting themselves on the back for it. Feeding baby whole food from 6 months should be normal - not given MBEs for pointing this out. It is the pureeing and mashing and freezing ice cubes of food and slopping 'baby rice' about which is the abnormal way of eating.

Surely as long as you follow their lead, you are doing blw

No. Baby isn't feeding themselves. They aren't leading the way - they aren't actively engaged in feeding themselves. With spoon feeding they are passive - sure maybe opening their mouths, but they aren't learning to manipulate food with hands or move textures around their mouth and chew them. The benefits of BLW is that baby is learning so much and improving their coordination etc. Spoon feeding isn't the same.

No, captain, they are leading the way - they are leading it by telling you that what they want is to have certain foods spoon fed to them because they prefer it.

Don't make the assumption that just because a weaning baby likes to be spoonfed certain foods they aren't "moving textures around their mouth or chewing". That's a bit ridiculous. Spoon-feeding a baby doesn't mean everything is pureed down to complete liquid or they don't put other foods in their mouth themselves

It's more than name that Rapley has chosen which is a misnomner. I'm not disputing that she has a style and an argument and that this suits a lot of parents and babies. But if you think about it, "baby-led weaning" it's a pretty bollocks name for it. Being "baby-led", as a standalone phrase, means doing what your baby would like to do - be it finger food, purees, spoon-feeding or eating mum's dinner from her plate.

And to follow on from what rally said, at 8mo, I'm going to put actually giving my baby the food they request over insisting that they do it themselves and "improve their co-ordination"...

So captain how do you think babies who are spoon fed ( by your definition) learn to "manipulate food with hands or move textures around their mouth and chew them."?

Do you think they don't learn to do these things becasue they aren't doing the "official" BLW?

for Thurlow who is right!

Maybe the problem is that baby-LED weaning is actually mis-named.

Bugger. Am 39 and thanks to this thread have realised that I do not know how to manipulate food with my hands or move textures around my mouth and chew. Curse my mother for weaning me with pureed food and finger foods.

Captain, you do realise that spoon feeding isn't necessarily passive don't you? I gave my boys a bowl of their own with some mashed food and a spoon whilst also spoon feeding them myself - this allowed them to feed themselves, I also used to give finger foods to gnaw on whilst they were in their high chairs - thus allowing them to feed themselves. Just because somebody doesn't Baby Led Wean, it doesn't necessarily follow that they don't allow their children to feed themselves or that the child is overfed.

DS1 used to use his spoon to feed me; is that Baby Led Feeding aka a spoon of yogurt up your nose...

I didn't diss traditional weaning or spoon feeding - I traditionally weaned DS3 as he was 2months prem. Just don't moan about BLW when you don't actually know what it is. It is not just finger foods.